Tag Archives: The Creation of the American Republic

The Christian Science Monitor offers a list of fifteen books on the American Revolution for your Fourth of July reading pleasure. It’s not a bad list, although I think my personal picks would only include a couple of their selections.

Let me stress that my list isn’t a balanced representation of the historiography, not by any means. If somebody grabbed me by the shirt collar and asked me for fifteen books that would give them a pretty good overview of the Revolution, that list would look quite different from this one. I’m not aiming for complete coverage. These are just my personal faves.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer. When Clio goes about sprinkling her magic fairy dust, she bestows a more generous dose on some historians than others. She poured a tenfold measure on Fischer.

Paul Revere’s Ridealso by David Hackett Fischer. Another examination of a Revolutionary event in which Fischer uses the technique of “braided narrative” to reconstruct an important event, unpack all its implications, and present it in the form of an engrossing story.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution also by Gordon Wood. The Revolution changed the pre-modern world into the modern one. Wood explains how and why, and he does it in prose so crystal clear that it’s easy to forget what intellectual heft this book has.

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis. There are a lot of books on Washington, but I admire the way Ellis captures his essence in this concise portrait. It’s not a cradle-to-grave treatment, but it’s more effective than just about any book out there if you want to get your head around the man and his significance. Same goes for Ellis’s Jefferson book.

As I said, my list leaves out a lot of important authors and topics, while other subjects are overrepresented. A comprehensive Revolutionary reading list should also include Alfred Young, T.H. Breen, Gary Nash, Linda Kerber, Rhys Isaac, and Mary Beth Norton. Likewise, it should have more thorough coverage of the shift from Confederation to Constitution, include biographies of additional key players, and make some space for the important campaigns in the North—to say nothing of the Revolution’s impact on women, slaves, Indians, tenants, and the urban underclass.

But those are the fifteen Am Rev books I’ve read and re-read with the most pleasure and awe. Feel free to share your own picks in the comments.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of these two books. Both of them helped generate historians’ appreciation of republicanism as the dominant theme of revolutionary politics, a synthesis that made sense of eighteenth-century Americans’ obsession with public virtue, the common good, and the invasive nature of power.

Ideological Origins and Creation of the American Republic have something in common besides their arguments, something that explains why both books were seminal when first published and have stood the test of time. In assembling their work, both Bailyn and Wood let the evidence guide them. They saturated themselves in what revolutionary-era Americans were reading and writing, they looked for patterns, and they made sense of it all. They didn’t ask, “What were eighteenth-century Americans thinking about such-and-such a subject?” Instead, they simply asked, “What were eighteenth-century Americans thinking?”

Writing the history of political thought, or any kind of intellectual history, should be an attempt to recover a past worldview. Bailyn and Wood didn’t consider themselves to be shapers of the evidence. They considered themselves subject to it, and that accounts for their work’s remarkable staying power; they listened to the American Revolutionaries and then allowed them to speak to us.